notes The Source is a modern-day oratorio, and a patchwork of songs based on American primary-source texts. The subject is Chelsea Manning, the US Army Private who infamously leaked hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010.

The text, culled and arranged by librettist Mark Doten, sets Manning's words and sections of the classified material known as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary.

The Source was premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival in October 2014 - in a production by Beth Morrison, directed by Daniel Fish, with video designed by Fish and Jim Findlay - to four sold-out performances and rave reviews. (More about this production below). The Source was released as an album on New Amsterdam Records in October 2015.

‘The Source’ prompts dinner table conversation. It offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism - film and television have that covered - but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.

— Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times

Excerpt from the 2014 production of THE SOURCE at BAM Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn; directed by Daniel Fish, with video design by Jim Findlay and Daniel Fish

[S]ome of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre.

— Seth Colter Walls, Pitchfork

notes on the text from librettist Mark Doten The central fact of the classified materials that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning leaked is their almost ungraspable scope. They include 483,000 Army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and 251,000 diplomatic cables; these were released, along with video of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, by WikiLeaks and its media partners in 2010. The reporting at the time focused less on what the leaks revealed about America’s conduct of wars and diplomacy, than on the personalities involved.

The libretto for The Source is made from a patchwork of primary-source documents, including:

The US military documents leaked by Pfc Manning and released by WikiLeaks: these are known as the "Iraq War Logs" and "Afghan War Diary"

Internet chats between Manning and former hacker Adrian Lamo, later published by Wired.com (see below for more information)

Tweets from Lamo regarding his decision to turn in Manning

an array of questions that journalists have posed to Julian Assange

selections of interviews, radio, social media and popular music, drawn primarily from the same time period as the leaks

And as the texts felt cut up, a la Naked Lunch, and reassembled, so did Hearne’s music sound like myriad influences exploded and roughly pasted back together, the work of a true twenty-first century polyglot.”

— Henry Stewart, Opera News

THE SOURCE - ALBUM RELEASED OCTOBER 2015produced by Nick Tipp, Jesse Lewis and Ted Hearnerecorded by Jesse Lewis at Avatar Studios (Manhattan) and Systems Two Studios (Brooklyn)

The piece is scored for two electric guitars and drums alongside the chorus, and the relations between the two groups — the mechanized, scarily protean sounds of the instruments on one side and the distinctly human singing on the other — turns into a deft and fertile metaphor. It helps that Hearne writes with such technical assurance and imaginative scope. The cantata ranges widely in approach, from sculptural pastiches to vast dramatic anthems to utterances of limpid tenderness (one late movement is a gentle, lovely pop song whose rhythms slowly drift out of phase.)

— Joshua Kosman, The San Francisco Chronicle (5.19.14)

In ‘Sound from the Bench,’ Hearne confronted big-picture issues with a huge variety of ideas bumping into each other... Two electric guitars and a percussionist resembled emergency alarms, often with a vocal obbligato that kept the piece from being merely industrial. Compelling, densely packed harmonies were served up by female voices. 

notes Sound From the Bench is a 35-minute cantata for chamber choir, two electric guitars and drums, with a libretto by Jena Osman. It was co-commissioned by Volti and The Crossing.

why these texts?Sound From the Bench is a reaction to Jena Osman's incredible book "Corporate Relations," a collection of poems that follows the historical trajectory of corporate personhood in the United States. The five movements combine language taken from landmark Supreme Court Cases with words from ventriloquism textbooks.I was instantly drawn to Osman's work because of its rich intertextuality: she appropriates a variety of texts from diverse sources and assembles them into a powerful bricolage. I strive toward a similar polyphony of oppositional voices and perspectives in my music, and to bring the chaotic forces of life into the work itself. It was this impulse, and the unabashedly political tone of Osman's poetry, that made me want to set some part of "Corporate Relations" to music.

why electric guitars?Sound From the Bench is built around the tension between the human voice and electric guitar. The electric guitar can sound like literally anything. Through circuitry, programming, and analog and digital manipulation, the pitches and rhythms a guitarist plays can be utterly transformed, erasing all human touch. It speaks through an amplifier and could easily drown out any voice. These cyborg-esque qualities contrast the human voice, both in its inescapable limitations and the complex differences found in every individual vocal timbre.

what does "no mouth" mean?No mouth is Osman's paraphrase of the central reasoning behind the majority in Bellotti v. First National Bank, the 1978 case upon which Citizens United is based: because corporations don't have a literal mouth, they cannot literally speak, therefore advertising is their only available method of communication and must be considered speech (and is entitled to First Amendment protections as such).

The phrase the very heart, also found in the second movement, is excerpted from Justice White's dissent in this case: "It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process."

about the third movementThe central movement sets words from the oral argument to Citizens United. My brain started firing when I realized this poem of Jena's was a literal erasure of the Supreme Court document – every phrase appeared in order, and in a position approximating the horizontal spot it appeared on the page. When I printed out the full 83-page oral argument and blacked out every phrase that Jena hadn't included, the remaining words jumped out at me and started to take on new meanings and inferences. That strange, new energy helped propel the decontextualized text into music.

The time at which the phrases appear approximate and in some way preserve the place at which they appear in the original document. The music between Osman's text, that which fills the "blank pages," sometimes includes a quote from Thomas Tallis's motet Loquebantur Variis Linguis (the text is: "The Apostles spoke in different tongues – Alleluia.") Aside from loving this music, I liked the image of our Justices as apostles.

"personhood"What could this word even mean when it is applied to non-human things? The courts have systematically granted constitutional rights to corporations since the Civil War - we concede that a corporation can "speak" even though it has no mouth – and these rights have come at the expense of both the private citizen and the government.

a corporation is to a person as a person is to a machine

friends of the court we know them as good and bad, they too are sheepand goats ventriloquizing the ghostly fiction

a corporation is to a body as a body is to a puppet

putting it in caricature, if there are natural persons then there are thosewho are not that, buying candidates. there are those who are strong onthe ground and then weak in the air. weight shifts to the left leg whilethe propaganda arm extends.(Jena Osman, from Corporate Relations)

- program notes by Ted Hearne, with passages after Eric Howerton's review of Corporate Relations for "The Volta Blog"